Rabih Alameddine - The Hakawati

“I think I will, but when I come back, you’ll take a break. You’ll go home and take a bubble bath. I’ll take a drive. I need to see the old neighborhood again.”

“Why now? There’s nothing there.”

I shrugged. “It was Hafez’s idea. I want to remember.”

“And I want cigarettes,” she said.

Once upon a time, I was a boy with potential. I roamed the streets of this neighborhood. Once upon a time, this was a neighborhood with possibility. Now it lay decrepit, dying. A couple of buildings were being erected. A few people walked here and there. Hope, however, was nowhere to be found. Once upon a time, I used to play in these streets, scamper between these buildings. This used to be both my sanctuary and my mystery zone. Under garden shrubs, in concrete nooks, behind ivy-covered metal railings, I hid and observed the world around me. Now everything seemed wide open. The neighborhood had developed new habits. Still, I wanted to find my way home. I wanted to walk through the lobby, take the stairs — not the unreliable elevator — go up past the apartment with the fig tree to the fourth floor, and be there, exist.

But my knees were weak. I stood outside the building leaning against my father’s black car, as I had been a few days earlier, staring, lost in a world I knew nothing of. I was a tortoise that had misplaced its shell. The same old man was sitting on the same stool in the same spot. His white hair was still upright, and he still stared through me as if I didn’t exist.

I always imagined depression as necrotizing bacteria, and I felt flesh-eating gloom approaching. Think pleasant thoughts.

The tangy, sweet taste of freshly picked mulberries on my tongue.

Maqâm Saba.

Fatima holding me. The light on Lake Como. Fatima in a veil.

The noise on Via Natale del Grande. Beirut in April.

Uncle Jihad walking into a room. Uncle Jihad telling me stories. My grandfather drinking maté next to his stove.

Mr. Farouk in the bathtub, the oud on his dry, round stomach, playing his homeland’s maqâms because the acoustics were delightful in the bathroom, playing them by the light of candles floating in the tub, playing them to seduce me into playing again.

The Arab voice of Umm Kalthoum.

My father’s black hair, thick enough for fingers to hide in. My mother’s beehive. The acidic smell of her hairspray. Her ruby ring.

On the seventh day, Shams stopped howling, though he kept weeping. He stood up, stormed out of his room with Ishmael and Isaac keeping pace, and opened every door in the palace. “Layl,” he cried, “where are you?” He walked in on the emir’s wife admonishing a servant for forgetting to dust under the bed. “Layl, where are you?”

He walked in on the emir lying fully clothed on a bed, berating a naked maid. “How can you not know what Layla does to her husband, Othman?” the emir asked. “Have you not been paying attention to the story? I want you to do to me what Layla does to Othman.”

“Layl,” Shams cried. “Where are you?”

In the kitchen, he saw the staff preparing meals, but no trace of his twin. In the halls, viziers and ministers ran around chiding their attendants. In the dining room, thirteen servants polished silverware, gossiping and mocking their patrons. Grooms fed horses in the stables, yet there was no trace of his beloved. He ventured out of the palace and into the garden. The line of waiting worshippers remained as long as ever, all weeping and commiserating, thousands of humans, but no Layl. Their idol and his guardian imps broke through the line, back and forth, and none dared reach out to him or utter a word. Shams entered his temple, gawped at the throne. Standing before his altar, he unleashed another howl and was joined by Isaac and Ishmael.

He returned to the palace and retraced his steps, opening every door, checking every room, until he was back at the shrine howling again. For forty days and forty nights, he repeated the faithful process, a ritual of anguish, his feet landing in the same marks each time.

The fall from the worshipped to the mocked is a short one. Those who once prayed to him began to poke fun at him. The idol had become a joke. No longer the prophet or Guruji, he became Majnoun, the crazy one.

The emir’s wife woke up feeling light and cheerful. She touched her husband gently, and he jolted up in bed, shouting, “Taboush, hero of the lands.” He looked right and left to gauge where he was.

“I feel wonderful this morning,” his wife said.

“You are hot,” the emir said.

“Really?” She put her hands to her cheeks.

He raised the sheets and looked under. “Your hand is hot. Look.”

She tilted her head. “Not now, dear. I am feeling good this morning.”

“But look at my member’s tumescence. It has never been this big. You are hot.”

“Oh,” she exclaimed as waves of heat shimmered up from her body.

Majnoun opened the bedroom door. “Layl, where are you?” He walked in, followed by the two red imps, tears trickling down his face. He looked under the bed, behind the curtains, behind the two chairs. He walked out.

“A momentous change has come upon me,” said the emir’s wife, “and I do not mean menopause.”

Needing to be distracted, the emir rose and went off in search of his hakawati. The emir’s wife called her maid. “Dress me in my finest.” The maid stared hopelessly at the rows and rows of ecru robes. “That one,” the emir’s wife said, pointing. “And bring out my diamonds.”

The line of devotees had not moved for days and days, but when the prophet’s mother entered the sun temple, a twitter rose among the believers. The emir’s wife sat on the throne, smoothed her robe, patted her hair into place. “Next.”

• • •

As the tales of Majnoun traveled the land, so did those of his mother. He did not sleep, they said, he did not eat, but kept searching for a love long vanished. Demons of love tortured his restless world. His turquoise eyes had turned ruby.

His mother — his mother, though, was astonishing. She was not the bearer of miracles her son had been, but she gave better advice. She was, after all, more devout. “My child,” the emir’s wife said to a young woman who was problematically hirsute. “Pluck, pluck, pluck. Never shave. God does not bless those who avoid hard work. You are still young; you do not want stalks of wheat growing there when you are forty.” The line grew, and the seekers returned in force.

And on the fortieth day, Majnoun left the palace. In the inhospitable desert where little lived, Majnoun wandered night and day. Every rootless tribe he encountered along the way began by mocking him.

“There walks Majnoun, the insane one. He fell in love with a boy.”

“There goes Majnoun, the madman. He fell in love with his brother.”

But the desert Bedouins wept upon first sight of Majnoun’s unrequited grief.

With each step, Majnoun tore out a clump of his beautiful hair, throwing it behind him. The hair grew back instantly, only to be clutched and torn once more, and again. Following the forlorn one, Isaac and Ishmael walked a trail of sun-colored hair that snaked across the desert. Wind could not move the trail or change its direction, and all the weeping creatures of the desert began to follow the march of grief. Shams roamed until the trail was two hundred and forty-nine leagues, and then he collapsed upon the sand and buried himself underneath.

“Come out, my nephew,” said Ishmael.

“Rise, my hero,” said Isaac.